the future of the public in East Asia

We’re Queer, We’re (Not) Here

October 27, 2023 by Jieun Cho

Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Alex Wolff
October 24, 2023

Queer activism often includes public visibility. But everyday surveillance and economic risk complicate LGBTQ+ politics in South Korea.

Author’s note: All the names in this piece are pseudonyms and locations have been withheld.

In 2021, I attended a protest held in a bustling shopping district near a local university in South Korea. It was organized by LGBTQ+ student groups and a regional LGBTQ+ advocacy group supported by Korea’s progressive party, Jeong-uidang, to raise public consciousness of LGBTQ+ Koreans’ presence in everyday life and the need for an anti-discrimination law. Some organizers held placards bearing phrases like “The youth want a comprehensive anti-discrimination law!” Others marched the streets, wrapping LGBTQ+ flags around their bodies like capes. We took photos and videos and later uploaded them on social media with #WeAreHere and #StopDiscrimination. The protesters, largely in their twenties, chanted, “We are here!” (우리는 여기 있다!), a phrase often repeated in queer activism in South Korea. To me, it sounded like saying, “We exist!”

But beyond the celebratory colors and phrases, this event was carefully planned and executed to manage the risks activism posed for each protester. The organizers made sure that we recorded ourselves during the protest in case we were refused entry into stores or harassed because of our outfits. Protesters also hid their faces with rainbow-patterned surgical masks during the march. When uploading the recorded footage and photos later online, they censored participants’ faces and altered their voices for anonymity. These measures were taken in response to a well-founded fear of being “outed,” both online and off, which could ultimately cost their social connections and chances for employment.

LGBTQ+ Koreans build politics between a desire for collective visibility and individual invisibility even as the possibility of being “outed” haunts their public and private lives. By selectively concealing and revealing their identities and intentions to others, queer and trans young adults manage to be with and keep a distance from the largely heteronormative public.

Image Credit: JEONG-EUIDANG COMMISSION FOR SEXUAL AND GENDER MINORITIES & SOLIDARITY FOR THE ENACTMENT OF THE ANTI-DISCRIMINATION LAW
Image Caption: Undisclosed city, South Korea. Protest for a national anti-discrimination law and awareness of LGBTQ+ Koreans in 2021.
Image Description: A group of 14 people standing in a public park on a rainy day, waving “hello” at the camera. They are wearing rainbow flags like capes, rainbow surgical masks, and holding umbrellas. Their faces are censored with a digital mosaic pattern.

Queer life under a heteronormative gaze

Following student activism that helped bring about Korea’s shift from a military dictatorship to a parliamentary democracy in 1987, LGBTQ+ student groups flourished at top universities. Yet compared to the youths who risked their lives to participate in democratization, contemporary Korean young adults are often portrayed as risk-averse, self-interested, and generally indifferent to politics because of economic pressures.

Since economic liberalization following the Asian financial crisis (1997–1998), irregular employment with lower job security, benefits, and income became normalized in South Korea. The brunt of these transformations has disproportionately affected those in their twenties and thirties. A recent report suggests that nearly 40 percent of those in their twenties depend on parents for primary financial support, and over half of unmarried people in their thirties live with their parents.

Yet this narrative of depoliticization is contradicted by young adults’ key role in activism related to the 2014 Sewol Ferry disaster and mass uprisings against government corruption in 2016–2017. Though often unrecognized in public discourse, LGBTQ+ student groups have also been instrumental in the recent groundswell of youth activism in Korea. Over the past decades, queer and trans students have worked to promote anti-discrimination, legislative reform, and destigmatization. Their activities significantly expanded in the mid-2000s, creating groups at more than seventy universities and even cross-university organizations.

Image Credit: JEONG-EUIDANG COMMISSION FOR SEXUAL AND GENDER MINORITIES & SOLIDARITY FOR THE ENACTMENT OF THE ANTI-DISCRIMINATION LAW
Image Caption: Flier for the 2021 anti-discrimination protest. The translated text reads, “Gender and Sexual Minorities are nowhere to be found. But we’re everywhere without a doubt. So now we’re going to show you. We are here now.”
Image Description: Protest poster for a LGBTQ+ activism event. Depicts a stylized street with rainbow flags and the message is depicted in a handwritten font in Korean.

Still, as was evident in the protest I attended, students participating in LGBTQ+ activism frequently expressed anxiety over potential harassment and the long-term effects of discrimination. The ubiquity of surveillance in both public spaces and interpersonal relationships have largely contributed to this concern. Like many other countries, in Korea surveillance infrastructure is pervasive and social practices of self-and-other monitoring are a part of daily life. With almost a million security cameras installed by public institutions alone, being recorded in everyday settings is nearly inevitable. People’s daily routes are also logged by banking institutions whenever they use bank cards to pay public transportation fares. The ubiquity of smartphones and social media such as Twitter are also creating a condition for what Brooke Erin Duffy and Ngai Keung Chan call “imagined surveillance”: users’ conscious control over what information they publicize online based on the anticipated scrutiny of peers and employers.

Combined with public homophobia and transphobia, surveillance culture enacts an imagined heteronormative gaze for LGBTQ+ folk—something underscored by regular anti-LGBTQ+ organizing at pride events. At a queer festival hosted in Incheonin 2018, for example, anti-LGBTQ+ protestors from conservative civic groups harassed and physically injured festivalgoers.

They also stoked LGBTQ+ attendee’s fears of being outed by recording them without consent. According to a festival organizer, they taunted, “If you’re proud, then don’t cover your face!” Fears of being surveilled while participating in facets of queer life were further emphasized by the pandemic, as individual privacy was often curtailed to create public safety. In May 2020, state-led contact tracing methods even led to the outing of a twenty-nine-year-old man to his family and employer after his visiting businesses in Itaewon, one of Seoul’s few explicitly queer-friendly neighborhoods.

Although many LGBTQ+ Koreans I met were already out to certain friends, family members, and peers, they frequently worried that mismanaged publicity could jeopardize their employability. Young adults are broadly impacted by economic insecurity, but the situation is more fraught for LGBTQ+ Koreans because there are no enforceable anti-discrimination laws for protection in the workplace—or anywhere else—in society. A 2015 report by the National Human Rights Commission of Korea detailed that 44 percent of LGBTQ+ workers who came out or were outed in the workplace faced discrimination, including pay reductions, exclusion from promotions, or even forced resignations. One college group leader, Yeoungho, clearly summarized this situation when he told me, “Doing activism is burdensome, especially because many of us aren’t economically stable yet. I feel like I won’t be hired if they find out I’ve been doing queer activism. There are so few queer-friendly careers that I can count them on one hand.” For these reasons, many LGBTQ+ interlocutors in their twenties and thirties were particularly concerned that being associated with queer politics could cost their social connections and professional careers.

Between risk and possibility

Under these circumstances of pervasive heteronormative surveillance and a volatile labor market, interlocutors practiced what I conceptualize as a queer politics of “discretion,” in reference to Lilith Mahmud’s definition of the term as “a contextualized set of revealing and concealing practices, of knowing how much to say, to whom, and when.”

For many LGBTQ+ young adults, discretion is a way to stay engaged in collective politics while preserving themselves. One college group leader, Sungwoo, explained various strategies taken to mitigate the risks of being outed in activist and more mundane situations. Group members often don masks and costumes during protestsand commonly use pseudonyms (hwaldong-myeong) when referring to one another. When organizing LGBTQ+ students’ events on campus, the members of Sungwoo’s group would describe their events as “human rights festivals for minorities” to stave off harassment. When confronted by other students, they often claim to be allies—because being a queer ally is more socially acceptable than actually being queer. They also removed the label from their official meeting room door to prevent defacement, rumors, and bullying, making it a kind of open secret. As another group leader, Narei, explained in an interview, “We take a lot of care to secure participants’ anonymity. The primary goal is that everyone ends up safe and that no one is outed. If we let one person get outed, it becomes pointless and contradicts the existence of our group and the purpose of our activism.”

But the outcomes of queer discretion are not always liberatory. Sungwoo confessed, “Finding the balance between activism and the rest of my life is becoming harder as I get closer to graduation, because I actually have to think about my future now.” To practice queer discretion entails the constant anticipation of discrimination, which creates a heavy affective burden of self-regulation—in line with the neoliberal demands of the market and discourses of hetero- and cisnormativity.

When we discussed the future of queer politics in Korea, Yeongho said he was more worried about the people doing activism than the activism itself. He likened this tension to activists “passing a bomb around” (pogtan dolligi) among themselves, not knowing when it would explode. As Sungwoo described, it invites both risk and possibility: “Finding people to do activism is so hard because there’s always a possibility of being outed and experiencing even more economic instability. It’s exhausting. All my friends worry about this. But we have to do it to make ourselves real to the rest of the world.”

Many interlocutors, including Sungwoo, emphasized the significance of cultivating discretionary politics that entailed not just visibility but also invisibility as a means toward both everyday survival and activism. As Naisargi Dave and Cymene Howe have observed, the dominant logic of visibility politics—a belief that more visibility leads to increased tolerance—does not always define queer activism transnationally. On the one hand, queer Koreans’ careful work to ensure each other’s mutual invisibility emphasizes the vulnerability of their subject positions. On the other, it highlights the importance of ethical discretion within queer politics and the very practice of ethnographic research. As my larger work explores, queer discretion exists alongside other semi-public forms of politics, allowing queer and trans interlocutors different political and social possibilities, even as it complicates their existing vulnerabilities. More than just being “out” or “passing” as heterosexual or cisgender, their politics attempt self-preservation while aspiring to build a future of collective recognition and rights for queer and trans Koreans.

Alex Wolff (they/she) received their PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Irvine, and is a Korea Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto. Their piece draws on field research conducted between 2018 and 2022 with LGBTQ+ folk in South Korea. Their research examines intersections among economics, temporality, and politics, through a focus on issues of gender and sexuality in Korea.

Wolff, Alex. 2023. “We’re Queer, We’re (Not) Here.” Anthropology News website, October 24, 2023.

Feeling Futures of Diversity in Japan

October 8, 2023 by Jieun Cho

Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Daniel White
September 27, 2023

The global growth of interest in building machines with artificial emotional intelligence sheds surprising light on how engineers in Japan are reimagining diversity through companion robots.

Stories of humans and robots cohabiting harmoniously have long been popular in Japan. In recent years, Japan’s robot manufacturers have increasingly attempted to bring this idea to life by equipping robots with capacities to care for others. For example, Softbank’s four-foot-tall humanoid robot Pepper, introduced in 2014, is marketed as the “the world’s first personal robot that can read emotions.” The animated hologram Azumi Hikari, produced by Gatebox Inc. in 2016, is designed to realize the “ultimate return home” for those who do not otherwise have or prefer a human companion. Fujisoft’s Palro is created as a communication partner for the elderly. And Sony’s pet robot AIBO (1999–2006) and re-released as “aibo” in 2018—a name that combines “AI” with “robot” but that also plays on the Japanese word for “partner” or “pal” (aibō)—is imagined as a constant companion.

Image Credit: Daniel White
Image Description: A small silver canine-like robot is standing on a small stage and facing the camera. To the right of the robot, in the background, is a sign that reads “aibo” in red letters.
Caption: aibo by Sony, featured at a conference on AI in Tokyo in 2019.

In a fieldwork project on the rise of emotional technologies like these, my colleague Hirofumi Katsuno and I ask how practices of modeling emotion in machines are transforming expressions of human emotionality more generally in society. As we have described elsewhere, at the heart of these experiments is heart itself. Across different models of companion and care robots, Japanese engineers attempt to build robots that can express a sense of heart (kokoro) by leveraging artificial emotional intelligence to contribute to a future of human-robot care. Technologies like cameras connected to software that reads facial expressions, for example, or sensors that respond to affectionate forms of touch with haptic feedback can give these robots elementary capacities to display affection.

Intriguingly for many, these machines also raise discussions about whether robots should be granted the right to be considered as legitimate members of Japanese society. While such discussions have stimulated new ideas about how diversity in a future society might be extended beyond human members, they have also raised concerns that a robot-inclusive diversity might come at the expense of other humans.

Robot-inclusive diversity

In 2018, the robotics startup GROOVE X introduced a small furry robot on wheels called LOVOT that was designed for just one thing: “to be loved by you.” In the updated release of LOVOT 2.0 in 2022, GROOVE X shifted its marketing campaigns to add to this message on love an emphasis on diversity. A tagline for the new LOVOT on the company’s official website reads, “All to express the diversity and complexity of life. 10+ CPU cores (central processing units), 20+ MCUs (micro controller units), 50+ sensors reproduce behavior like a living thing. A new relationship between robots and people begins here.”

Image Credit: Daniel White
Image Description: Two small brown furry robots on wheels stare at the camera with LED eyes. One is wearing a beige onesie; the other is wearing beige overalls.
Caption: LOVOT by GROOVE X

When GROOVE X introduced its new PR materials on “diversity,” it also institutionalized what the company’s founder and CEO, Hayashi Kaname, had been promoting for years: the idea of a society of genuine human-robot coexistence (kyōzon). Importantly, the use of the word “diversity” (tayōsei) is applied here to refer to all “living things” (seibutsu), a category which GROOVE X proposes could be inclusive of robots like LOVOT. Thus,GROOVE X’s framing of LOVOT as a “living thing” promotes the possibility of welcoming LOVOT into a future society where “diversity” might be extended to nonhuman robot persons.

Prior to GROOVE X’s latest campaign, at an event called Industry Co-Creation held in 2020, Hayashi outlined in detail his vision of an emerging future of robot-inclusive diversity. Building on themes of diversity and social justice—which had gained attention in global advertising cultures—he proposed to an audience of fellow technologists and mass media that his company’s latest companion robot exemplifies a model of diversity.

What kind of era will the world face in the future? I think we are facing an era of the robot native [robotto neitibu no jidai]. Until now diversity has been used to refer to skin color and gender, but in the future, I wonder if the borders between living and nonliving things will be erased. Ultimate diversity leads to peace. I want to create that kind of technology and disseminate it from Japan.

Hayashi is familiar with critiques of the lack of diversity in AI, where AI media images have been criticized for their explicit “whiteness” and AI algorithms for their ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic biases based on machine learning data. By framing the inclusion of robots like LOVOT into society in terms of global social justice, Hayashi presents robots as equally deserving of it as people.

Other robot advocates agree with Hayashi’s perspective that robots deserve a place in societies as a distinct species. The legal scholar Inatani Tatsuhiko has been working for several years on creating legal codes that can promote a society in which humans and robots coexist in harmony. This is imperative, in Inatani’s view, because there exist no uniform codes of law for regulating human-machine relations in the emerging age of artificial intelligence. He suggests that “rather than trying to determine what the essence of machines and human beings is, everyone should think about what kind of society we want first, and then discuss the distribution of legal responsibilities appropriate for that purpose.”

Inatani further recommends that we gradually develop a “synthesized society” between human beings and artificial intelligence by considering “what we want to be with them.” Inatani’s point is that public discussions on the philosophical nature of humans, machines, and AI cannot provide a useful guide for living well with machines. Instead, he proposes to consider human-machine relationships as an open-ended experiment which will yield new models for harmonious cohabitation.

Together, Hayashi and Inatani—among many others—seek to make a place in society for nonhuman robot persons by reconceptualizing the constituency of Japan’s future publics in relation to emotional and interactive capacities. The future of a robot-inclusive society may thus depend less on the makeup of its members than on those members’ abilities to generate what is seen as socially appropriate emotionality toward others, human or otherwise.

More-than-human or all-too-human diversity?

With such an emphasis on the inclusion of robots into society expressed by figures like Hayashi and Inatani, however, there is reason to wonder if the extension of care to robots may contribute to “socially appropriate” emotions that come at the expense of other humans.

While Japanese society has long been admired for its fantastically imaginative fictional characters and robot friends, it has also been criticized for its cultural homogeneity and far less friendly immigration policies. In fact, some ethnographers of Japanese robotics have pointed to an overt lack of diversity among Japan’s mostly male robotics engineers and its implications for the disproportionate number of robots gendered as female. Other ethnographers have raised concerns that certain government endorsements for employing robotic technologies in the elderly care sector attribute more rights to robots than to potential foreign care laborers, particularly from Southeast Asia. Still others have suggested that while robots may not prove to be a replacement for migrant care workers in Japan, they may ultimately deskill the forms of labor in which they are trained. As James Wright has argued in an intimate study of the use of the robot Pepper in a care home in Japan, these robots are still elementary and need the help of human staff to operate. Accordingly, a better word than replacement to describe the impact of care robots is displacement, as “the introduction of care robots displaces skills and practices,” “direct human-human contact,” and “caring for people.”

Such critiques point to practices in Japan of privileging technological diversity by protecting perceptions of human homogeneity. Importantly, these emerging debates over who will be incorporated into future imaginations of diversity in Japan are playing out in a marketplace increasingly focused on feeling. Corporations defend the value of developing robots that care given a Japanese society in which care is in deficit.

Seeking to capitalize off perceptions of increasing alienation and loneliness in contemporary Japan, given an aging society and decreasing birthrates, companion robot companies release prototypes in part to test how people respond to them affectively. Different designs—a furry robot on wheels (LOVOT), a puppy-like pet (aibo), a headless cushion with a wagging feline tail (QOOBO)—evoke different reactions among consumers that are not easy to anticipate or define. Robot makers intentionally focus on positive affect, amorphous feelings of comfort that can be produced by just being with robots. Producers imagine that this palpable but not always explainable form of comfort might expand the abilities for positive emotionality between humans and robots in so much that it is not dependent on the limits and expectations that come with human language, and can thus attend more directly to heart.

Image Credit: Yukai Engineering
Image Description: A woman photographed from the nose down, wearing a white blouse and blue jeans, is sitting on a gray sofa. In her lap she holds a black cat-like cushion robot with a tail and no head. To the right of her on the couch is another gray cat-like cushion robot with its tail sticking out to the left.
Caption: QOOBO

GROOVE X’s robot LOVOT is at the leading edge of building these companions with heart. Despite critiques that investment in robots may discount the value of certain human relationships, GROOVE X argues that the cultivation of affection for fictional and “haptic creatures” like LOVOT 2.0 is not a problem but is rather part of the promise of robot diversity. Hayashi and staff often claim that LOVOT is a “technology that cultivates humans’ power to love”; as Hayashi has qualified in conversation, such love need not be limited to humans or even to nonhuman animals. “When I look at LOVOT, I feel like we are entering an era in which we need not discriminate between humans and robots or even between robots and other living things.”

If the future of diversity in Japan is robot-inclusive, it is also one incorporating a history of people grappling over certain human exclusions. As the current biases of emerging AI and machine learning technologies are increasingly brought to light, both in Japanese and global technocultures, we might also question how optimistic visions of diverse machine-inclusive publics of the future in part trade on discounted visions of human diversity. For robot makers like Hayashi, however, the enlarged capacities of “heart” in LOVOT 2.0 have far-reaching implications for how we pursue human values such as diversity in the future, even redefining emotionality itself in and beyond Japan.

Daniel White is a research affiliate in anthropology at the University of Cambridge and author of Administering Affect. He researches emotion modeling in AI, social robots, and other affective and emotional technologies. His publications and ongoing projects can be found at modelemotion.org.

White, Daniel. 2023. “Feeling Futures of Diversity in Japan.” Anthropology News website, September 27, 2023.